Taking another shot at the cheap IP camera, part 2

A year after setting aside a Tuya-based cheap IP camera that refused to expose a local video stream, the author revisited the device and extracted its firmware, uncovering a Linux 3.4.35 kernel from 2013 and a CramFS/JFFS2 filesystem layout. The camera ships with an ONVIF server that should expose RTSP streams, but the firmware disables the server and closes its ports, and an earlier attempt to enable it via the Tuya configuration file—edited directly in the firmware image with a hex editor—likely failed because the edit corrupted a checksum. Rather than patching the image again, the author traced the ONVIF configuration option through the extracted filesystem, starting with the initrun.sh script that unpacks an app tarball and launches home/init.d/initS. The effort matters because ONVIF/RTSP support would let the camera stream locally without routing video through Tuya's cloud servers, a common complaint about budget IoT cameras. What to watch next is whether the init scripts and binaries actually consume the ONVIF setting or ignore it entirely, which would explain the failed configuration attempt and determine whether a firmware patch can unlock local streaming.